“I want to put the world right. I want what’s fair,” she interrupted, and it was a cry right from the center of her. It shook her voice into something younger somehow, because the world was not fair, and anyone her age already knew that. “If you drug Spencer Shaw, I can make him do right by us.”

I felt the power between us shift, just a bit. I had asked, and she had answered. She had given me something. “But it’s not fair to take Robert.” I used her word. “He’s innocent. I don’t know you, but I don’t think I ever did you wrong?” I made it a question, afraid of angering her.

I heard that thinking little hum she’d made before. “I am sorry for that.” It sounded like she meant it. “This isn’t about you, and I’m not without feeling. I know it’s hard, especially for a girl like you. You were raised soft, everything laid out on a pillow. Most folks open their eyes onto a harsher world.”

I had to protest this. “I’m not soft.”

She didn’t believe me. I could tell. She made a click noise with her tongue, almost a tutting sound, then said, “You married who you married, and he chose to work hand in glove with Spencer Shaw. So here we are. It’s not fair to you. But I am nigh out of time, and what happened to me and my daughter—it’s not fair either.”

Her voice stayed quiet, but I heard steel beneath it as she spoke about her child. This was the part of her I understood most, feared least. The part that clearly loved her daughter. I had no name for this woman, but of all the things I’d seen her be—kidnapper, stalker, witch—she was somehow tying herself tightest to this one: mother. A warm word, but so cold and strange when it was touching her. My own sweet-hearted, timid little mother was never called that. I called her Mom. Mama when I was small. Peyton had only just this year given up Mommy.

This woman, this mother, said to me, “Before I leave this earth, I am going to set things right.”

I smoothed on foundation, thinking hard. “Fair” might be the only word she’d said that truly mattered, if I wasn’t going to be blindly obedient. It was a clue to who she was and why she’d done this awful thing, and yet my mind shied from pursuing these questions further. She had Robert in her arms. She’d told me if she saw or heard any sign of the police, she would twist his— The very thought brought me back to her heel, obedient and good.